Wednesday, April 25, 2018

The Hugo Ballot: Novella

"And Then There Were (N-One)," by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, March/April 2017)

Binti: Home, by
Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com Publishing)

The Black Tides of
Heaven, by JY Yang (Tor.com Publishing)

Down Among the Sticks
and Bones, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.Com Publishing)

River of Teeth,
by Sarah Gailey (Tor.com Publishing)

My views here are fairly simple. It’s a decent shortlist,
but a bifurcated one. There are three nominees that are neck and neck in my
view, all first-rate stories and well worth a Hugo. And there are three that
are OK, but not special – in my view not Hugo-worthy (but not so obviously
unworthy that I will vote them below No Award.)

My ballot will look like this:

1.Sarah Pinsker, “And Then There Were (N – One)” –
A story about a convention of alternate Sarah Pinskers, complete with a murder.
It is warmly told – funny at time, certainly the milieu is familiar to any SF
con-goer. But it’s dark as well – after, there’s a murder – and it
intelligently deals with issue of identity and contingency.

2.Martha Wells, All Systems Red – a
ripping good novella about a security android which calls itself a murderbot,
guarding a group of researchers on an alien planet. The murderbot mainly wants
peace to watch its favorite TV shows, but that becomes impossible when the team
comes under threat. It soon becomes clear that there is an unexpected group on
the planet that doesn’t want any rivals, and the murderbot has to work with its
humans to find a way to safety. That part – the plotty part – is nicely done,
but the depiction of the murderbot is the story’s heart: convincingly a real
person but not a human, with emotions but not those that humans expect: very
funny at times but also quite moving.

3.Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones – I was rather disappointed by
Every Heart a Doorway, the first novella in McGuire’s Wayward Children series.
I thought its main character boring, and its murder mystery plot rather a mess,
and I thought the story just too long. For that reason, I passed on Down Among
the Sticks and Bones until it showed up on the Hugo shortlist. So I came to the
story with low expectations – and I was completely delighted. This isn’t just
better than Every Heart a Doorway – it’s LOTS better. This tells the backstory
of Jack and Jill, very important characters from the first book. They are
twins, born to a couple who aren’t really interested in children except for how
they look to their colleagues, and who force them into their ideas of the perfect
girls – Jacqueline is the pretty one (thought they look the same), intended to
be the popular one; while Jillian is the tomboy, the soccer player, the
adventurer. (The one weakness of the story is the characterization of the
parents – they’re a cliché, their faults seem forced.) The things is, that’s
not who the girls really are, and when they find a door into another world,
they take it, ending up on the Moors, a very dangerous place, ruled by a
vampire, and featuring other horrors like werewolves. Jack stays with a
relatively good man, and exercises her interest in learning and scientific
research. Jill stays with the vampire, wanting to become a vampire herself –
his heir, indeed. But when Jack takes a local girl as her lover, Jill’s
eventual reaction catalyzes the inevitable ending.

4.Sarah Gailey, River of Teeth – a caper story (OK, not a caper – an operation!)
about a mixed team of “hoppers” (hippopotamus wranglers, basically) assembled
to clear the lower Mississippi of feral hippos. Their leader, Winslow Houndstooth,
also wants revenge, against the man who burned down his hippo farm years
before. There’s a lot of violence, a truly evil villain, and a fair amount of
believable darkness. I mean, I enjoyed it. I just didn’t see it as special – in
particular in a speculative sense – yes, there’s the fairly cool alternate
history aspect involving the hippos in Louisiana, but nothing with real SFnal
zing. Still – it’s pretty fun.

5.JY Yang, The
Black Tides of Heaven – The story concerns the twin children of the
Protector, originally promised to the local Monastery. But one of them turns
out to have precognitive powers, and the Protector claims them … the other
strikes off on their own, ending up in a rebellion against their mother. The
good – a decent magic system (alas, treated in a clichéd fashion on occasion),
interesting if seemingly inconsistent and underdeveloped treatment of gender (to
be fair, the supposed inconsistencies may well be eventually explained), and
decent characters. The not-so-good: a fairly clichéd plot (which doesn’t really
resolve, though to be sure its companion novella was released in parallel, and
that may illuminate the story), rather ordinary prose, and some pacing issues,
mainly in the opening section (about a fourth of the story), which really
should have been almost entirely cut. Bottom line – an okay story that has been
ridiculously overpraised.

6.Nnedi Okorafor, Binti: Home – Much as with Every Heart a Doorway, I was puzzled by
the extravagant praise Binti received – I thought it kind of a mess, really
illogical, hard to believe. Alas, the sequel, unlike the McGuire story’s
prequel, is not much better than the opening, in my view. (Also, it doesn’t
come to a real conclusion.) Binti, after spending some time at Oomza Uni, comes
home to her family for a visit, and a pilgrimage. She is accompanied by her
friend Okwu, one of the murderous Meduse (who also altered Binti’s genetics,
though they didn’t kill her, unlike all her innocent prospective classmates). The
notion is apparently to make some repairs in the Meduse’s relationship with humans,
especially the Koush, a rival people to Binti’s Himba. But little enough happens
on that ground (presumably that’s left for the next installment) – instead,
Binti’s pilgrimage becomes a trip to the home of the mysterious Desert People,
who turn out to be part of her ancestry, and to have a relationship going far
back in history with a group of aliens with special tech. I have to say, my
main problem was that I just didn’t believe in the story, nor, really, in
Binti. It’s obvious a lot of people love these stories, and so it’s clear they’re
seeing something I’m missing. So be it – the fault may well lie with me. But I
didn’t like this story much, to be honest.

My nominees were, in alphabetical order by author:

1.Kathleen Ann Goonan, “The Tale of the Alcubierre
Horse”

2.Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Prime Meridian

3.Sofia Samatar, “Fallow”

4.Sarah Pinsker, “And Then There Were (N – One)”

5.Martha Wells, All Systems Red

In reality, the three that weren’t nominated are easy to
understand – they are the three least readily available. Goonan’s story is from
an original anthology (and one that didn’t seem to get a ton of attention, Extrasolar, from PS Publishing in the
UK). Samatar’s story is from her exceptional collection Tender, and story collections typically get less attention, especially for original stories, than either magazines or anthologies. Moreno-Garcia’s may be the most obscure – available only to
supports of her Indiegogo campaign (and to lucky reviewers!) Indeed, I suspect
it might be eligible for next year’s Hugo. But there were plenty of other
worthy potential nominees; for instance Damien Broderick’s “Tao Zero”, Dave Hutchinson’s
Acadie, and Jeremiah Tolbert’s “The
Dragon of Dread Peak”.

4 comments:

I'm in pretty close agreement on the ones I've read. 1) so clever! 2) great character 3) I liked the 1st one, but this is much better. 4&5) haven't read yet 6) I must be missing something too. And this is just a middle fragment of a story. Makes me wonder if at least some nominators already read the conclusion.

I do wonder if some people are nominating stories like BINTI:HOME and even THE BLACK TIDES OF HEAVEN partly because of other stories in the same series. That's understandable in a way but not the way I'd do it.

I think the first three on my ballot are a good example of three very different stories that could be ranked in any order -- they each do what they want to do very well, and there's no real way to say one is affirmatively "better" than the other, in my mind.

Extrasolar wasn't available in the US until 2018, so I think the stories from Extrasolar are eligible for the 2019 Hugo Awards. (See WSFS Constitution section 3.4.2: "Works originally published outside the United States of America and first published in the United States of America in the previous calendar year shall also be eligible for Hugo Awards."